Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• PDC05 - An Introduction to MSBuild

  Faisal Mohamood, a good friend, former colleague and more recently PM on the MS Build team, gave a great lunch session on the new MS Build System. It was originally scheduled for Day 1, but moved because the keynote ran so long. MS Build is the new build engine that ships with VS.NET 2005. It is based on a fully open and published XML file format and is completely customizable. You can extend the build process with managed code - adding your own tasks & loggers, for example. And more importantly, you no longer need VS.NET to build projects. (While it's true you could compile with just the SDK in the past, you couldn't compile existing projects). MS Build is built around three core concepts: Items Properties Targets Items are build artifacts on disk that can have rich metadata. Properties are statically defined scalars that can be used throughout the build process. The engine itself exposes a lot of built-in metadata. Targets are actions that can happen. You can use a predefined set... Posted Oct 08 2005, 08:17 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, PDC05

• PDC Content Available Online

  From the PDC weblog comes word that the PDC05 keynotes are available for streaming. Bill Gates and Jim Allchin Eric Rudder Steven Sinofsky Bob Muglia You can also read through all the breakout session presentations . Conference DVDs are being sent to all attendees this year. And good news for those who didn't make it to LA - videos from all of the sessions will be made available to everyone, for free, for six months (via Daniel). No mention of timing, but I assume it will coincide with the Nov timeframe discussed for DVDs. Posted Oct 07 2005, 09:19 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, PDC05

• PDC05 - An Overview on Vista Graphics

  A little discussion on the history of graphics on the Windows platform. One of the key goals in Vista is to take advantage of the hardware improvements and shift more processing to GPUs and so on. This is a shift from Gdi/GDI+/DirectShow to the new Direct3d and Windows Presentation Foundation. Direct3D 9 is available on XP. Direct 3D 10 will only be available in Vista and is geared towards simplifying access to new functionality on modern graphics cards. Windows Media Framework is the long term replacement for DirectShow and Windows Media SDK. It enables simply playback of protected audio and video. It also provides what they are now calling "resilient media playback" - that is, it will adapt to spikes in resource availability. This is especially important as we move to more and more intensive HD content. This 3D power is not tied simply to graphics and games, but is very open to the text engine as well. It is what makes custom fonts and stuff available. He then showed a demo of a videos... Posted Oct 07 2005, 09:06 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, PDC05

• What do you think about LINQ?

  Leon points out some LINQ love . Well, the article may be great, but I'm a bit more torn on the technology itself. The computer scientist part of me finds this very cool from an implementation perspective. The combination of anonymous types, lambda expressions, method extensions and a bit of compiler magic is a really neat do all of this. On the other hand, I'm still not sure I see the practical side of things. I cringe when I think of all the query logic that is going to be embedded in code. Actually, from this perspective my real problem is with DLINQ, not the LINQ syntax itself. That is, I really have no problem with a syntactic nicety on in-memory objects, I'm just a little more concerned when your code is so tied to an external data source. Yes, having the query as typed objects in code is better than having the query as a string. But really isn't the goal not to have the query in there at all? This is just terrible practice for any enterprise development. There is a reason we have... Posted Oct 07 2005, 08:49 AM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, PDC05

• Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas

  One of topics I was most excited about at PDC was Atlas , Microsoft's AJAX implementation. The ASP.NET team is positioning Atlas as not as "just another AJAX framework", but rather an end-to-end framework for developing rich UI in the web browser. It provides a lot of plumbing not just for doing things on the client, but in the communication between the client and server. The Atlas architecture, which Nikhil discusses here , is basically built of 3 major elements: a client script library, a rich component model on the server, and a series of client application services. The client has rich WebRequest, WebResponse and MethodRequest objects that mimic the CLR's http request model. Atlas provides a built-in service that exposes any .NET or COM component through their facade. You can, of course, also connect to any arbitrary web service directly - this service is just a means to access existing objects that don't expose a webservice facade on their own. One of the nicest features is automatic... Posted Sep 23 2005, 08:51 AM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, PDC05, AJAX

• Vista on the Tablet

  As I mentioned in my previous post, I have Vista up and running on the tablet. Curiously, the upgrade process failed again - it worked flawlessly when I did a fresh install. I had the same problem with Beta 1 on my desktop (from XP Home). Yet others have reported no problems doing an upgrade. Weird. The tablet experience is really much improved. Colin has a great overview of the new pen functionality . I'm glad I decided to upgrade the Tablet first... AS for the flyout TIP, it can get a little annoying if you work near the edge of the screen often (e.g., in Outlook!). I've actually disabled it. I find the new pen cursor quite usable, and I just love the spiffy new animation for right click. The pen flicks are a great feature once you master them. The only thing is, to get them working you really have to flick it... it sort of attracts attention. I feel like I'm playing Golden Tee or something. Handwriting recognition is also improved with the personalized recognition engine. I've always... Posted Sep 23 2005, 08:11 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Productivity, PDC05

• Integration Baseline Architecture

  I guess Faisal has either been too modest or too busy preparing for PDC05 to post this, so I've decided to post it for him. Prior to joining Microsoft full-time, Faisal was a consultant in the Patterns & Practices group. The Applied Integration Baseline Reference Implementation , one of the projects he had worked on while he was there, was recently published. The Applied Integration Baseline Reference Implementation illustrates how to use a pattern-driven approach to create a baseline architecture for a complex integration scenario. As an alternative to building applications in silos, learn how to integrate enterprise applications using BizTalk Server, Active Directory, Host Integration Server, SQL Server, and Visual Studio .NET. Download here . Integration design and testing is a particularly relevant topic in the SOA era. We are in the process of rolling out a massive portal-like application that aggregates hundreds of different servers, and I've spent the past year developing infrastructure... Posted Sep 06 2005, 07:44 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, PDC05

• I'm going to PDC05

  I'm going to PDC05 this year along with Jody . I'm flying in Mon night, which also happens to be my birthday, and will be staying at the Omni. I'm not going to make it to any of the pre-conference sessions. I'll have to look through some of the new sessions that were announced . Faisal is giving two sessions on MSBuild - which I'll be at for sure. ( Hopefully when this is all done, he'll find more time for blogging! ) Either way, I'm looking forward to a good week of geeking out. This will be my first PDC, so I'm hoping it lives up to the hype. A few old friends and colleagues will be there and it will be nice to catch up with them. If you're going and want to meet up one night, drop me a line. Actually, I'm headed to Los Angeles tomorrow morning for a long weekend. I'll do reconnaissance for the good bars and restaurants to hit up in September. Posted Jul 15 2005, 08:58 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, PDC05